As enterprises increasingly move their operations from the paper world to the electronic one, they lose critical capabilities of the old paper-based infrastructure. With paper records generated at each stage in a transaction, there was a natural record of the events. This paper trail provided a number of critical benefits including proof that the transaction occurred as specified at a particular time, an automatic backup of documents at each stage of the transaction, and the ability to file documents in the most appropriate manner or even duplicate them and place them in more than one file at once.
By contrast, when enterprises carry out transactions electronically, they lose all these benefits due to the following factors. First, because electronic documents are easily and undetectably modified, it's far easier to tamper with audit logs. Second, employees often incorrectly modify transactions and save them. Once this occurs, it is often extremely difficult to recover the original transaction, leading to accounting irregularities. Third, documents are stored by whatever program created them in whatever format that program uses.
While the first wave of computerization of business process removed the benefits of a paper infrastructure, the rise of XML-based Internet business processes allows enterprise to reclaim them. Once transactions occur over the Internet, it becomes possible to capture them in a separate device that then provides long term secure verification of and access to the message content. The barriers to performing this kind of capture and analysis include:                Detecting XML messages and extracting them from the surrounding network traffic.        Extracting the XML data from the underlying transport.        Providing high enough throughput under high message loads.        Maintaining a tamperproof log of all data recorded.        Accurately determining the time of processing in order to provide reliable auditing.        